Thread by @thetimes

'It was like a rap battle, with pencils'

@willpavia spoke with Jane Rosenberg about drawing the famous defendant — and how she feels about Maxwell turning her pencil on her
thetimes.co.uk/article/ghisla…

Rosenberg is the Holbein of the Maxwell trial, a court artist capturing the principal characters and sending out scenes of the unfolding drama that reach a massive audience.

You see her pictures everywhere. “I’m going viral,” she says

Maxwell’s family, recognising the power of a portrait, have hired their own courtroom artist to knock up a sympathetic picture for their website

But Maxwell herself has begun to look to Rosenberg, waving to her in court. “It’s been wonderful for me,” Rosenberg says.

“I’m so happy, I want to keep it going. I need to see her face”

The only time the courtroom artists can reliably see Maxwell from the front is during a seven-second period at about 8.30am when she walks into court through a heavy door to the left of the judge’s bench

Rosenberg grew up on Long Island in New York and studied art at the University of Buffalo. It was the early 1970s and “abstract art was very in”, she tells me. “My teachers always discouraged me from doing realism. They said it’s very passé”

Rosenberg ended up in court at the age of 30, after hearing a lecture from a courtroom artist. “I said: ‘I could never do this, I’m not fast enough,’ ” she says. But things were “really rough financially”

Pitching up at the Manhattan criminal court in the 1980s, she covered a murder case featuring a stagehand who attempted to rape a violinist and then threw her from the roof of the Metropolitan Opera House

40 years later, cameras are still barred from the federal courts, leaving it up to Rosenberg and her comrades to provide the visual record of the Maxwell trial

Read the full interview here: thetimes.co.uk/article/ghisla…